6.
She awoke in the same little room where she’d opened her eyes every morning for eighteen years… The sunlight shone through the breaches in the shutters, and for a moment Dóra had no idea where she was. She needed time to recognize the room, her old room, which her parents had repurposed after she’d left. The walnut tree in the garden, which had only been a delicate little sapling back in high school, now blocked some of the incoming light, so that the sun no longer blazed into the room through the shutter gaps like it once did. It took her a couple of seconds before she understood that she was back in Budapest and in their small apartment building on the Buda side of the river where she had been happy for so many years. All of a sudden, her stomach clenched up again, for she could no l
